Today, many applications have been developed for running on multifunctional devices, such as cellular telephones that include media players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc. Many of these applications are provided by sources other than the vendor of the multifunctional devices, and hence, they are commonly referred to as third party applications. These applications may perform a wide variety of functions, such as providing entertainment, social networking, etc. In performing these functions, the multifunctional devices may access contents stored in the multifunctional devices or over a network (e.g., the Internet).
To make it easier and more convenient for users of the multifunctional devices to organize and manage contents on the multifunctional devices, operating systems installed on the multifunctional devices typically provide searching capabilities. Because many of the applications installed on the multifunctional devices are third party applications, conventional operating systems installed in the multifunctional devices do not extend their search capabilities to these third party applications.